Wednesday, January 1, 2014

Epiphany vs. materialism

2014:In
my Epiphany post in 2010, I took a position independent of both
traditional Christian belief and scientific materialism. To
say more, I do not share Christian belief in Jesus being uniquely divine nor do I share materialist disbelief in spiritual
reality.*******
An epiphany is a manifestation of divinity. It can happen
unexpectedly in any circumstance. Most scientists refuse to believe that
real epiphanies happen, which leads me to the topic for today.

Yesterday
the Christian feast of Epiphany celebrated the wise men visiting the
infant Jesus. In church I was disappointed that the homilist, a learned,
highly-respected scripture scholar, spoke of the Magi story in the
Gospel of Matthew as if it were fact. I nodded when he encouraged us to
discern the direction of divine guidance at this beginning of a new era,
expecting him to throw an inclusive light on the subject, but he
floored me with his narrow interpretation.

He upheld
the Christian claim that Jesus is the only Son of God and savior of the
whole world, even adding the self-serving, christo-centric claim that
Jesus saves Hindus, Buddhists, etc.etc, even if they don’t know it. I’m
sure that, if questioned, he would be quick to agree in a politically
correct way that other religions have as much validity as Christianity.
But the two assertions contradict each other.
Darn, I was disappointed by the smallness of his vision!

A much more exciting and relevant explication of epiphany happened on NPR this past week. Fingerprints of God.
Barbara Bradley Hagerty never speaks the word “epiphany” but that’s
what she writes and talks about, somewhat reluctantly. She was a little
embarrassed, “spooked” to find herself experiencing transcendence.

An NPR correspondent, Hagerty explores whether science can find physical evidence of God in her book, Fingerprints of God: The Search for the Science of Spirituality. She wanted to know,

Does brain activity reflect encounters with a spiritual dimension?

I’m
glad she used terms like “spiritual dimension,” “transcendence” and
“spiritual reality” and never reduced God to a humanlike individual or
god.

Belief in matter-only dominates science—93% of
scientists believe God is a delusion conjured up by the brain. Spiritual
matters, it’s assumed, are no subject for scientific observation, but
in the last 20 years some neuroscientists have started looking for
physical evidence of the spiritual world.

Is God only
the result of chemical processes? Of a God spot in the brain? Is it just
the activity of nerve cells? Or do people actually touch the
Transcendent? Hagerty concludes that science can’t prove or disprove
God, but she believes there’s something there.

There is
a lobe in the brain that apparently registers awareness of Spirit and
there is a phenomenon called temporal lobe epilepsy, which leads some
scientists to believe that religious greats like Moses, Joan of Arc,
Mohammed, Teresa of Avila, Joseph Smith, the Buddha, and Paul on the way
to Damascus merely had this condition. But Hagerty doesn’t buy it. She
thinks the temporal lobe mediates spiritual experience instead of
causing it, and she uses the distinction between a CD player and a radio
to illustrate.

Turn off a CD player and the music is
gone; it’s in the gadget. Turn off a radio and you don’t hear the music
but it’s still being transmitted by the station. Just so, Spirit is
always transmitting, but some brains turn it off or have the volume so
low it’s hard to hear. Others are sensitively attuned to it, and a few
have the volume so high they actually may need medical help. Hagerty
thinks people with better antennae have more transcendent moments.
Added in 2013: The message—the thought or idea—is
independent of CD, radio, and every other physical means of
transmission; it is spiritual reality. So are all thoughts, ideas,
beliefs, etc.

Right here is the crux of disagreement
between non-believers and believers, and here I mean believers who are
well aware of religious tyranny, fraud, and foolishness. We think some
spiritual entity initiates transcendent events. We believe the
epiphanies come from a reality outside of our individual consciousness,
although we can cultivate habits that develop better antennae to receive
them. We can’t be shaken from our profound conviction of Something
Beyond this surface world, and we base this on experience. The
philosopher/psychologist William James in The Varieties of Religious Experience quotes such persons:

God is more real to me than any thought or thing or person.
God surrounds me like a physical atmosphere.

And he comments about this conviction:

These
feelings of reality . . . are, as a rule, much more convincing than
results established by mere logic ever are. . . . if you do have them . .
. you cannot help regarding them as genuine perceptions of truth, as
revelations of a kind of reality which no adverse argument, however
unanswerable by you in words, can expel from your belief.

James addresses rationalist pooh-poohing of anything spiritual.

If
you have intuitions at all, they come from a deeper level of your
nature than the loquacious level which rationalism inhabits. . . .
something in you absolutely knows that [the transcendent moment] must be
truer than any logic-chopping rationalistic talk, however clever, that
may contradict it.

Because William James looks at
spirituality as a disinterested observer, his conclusions have more
credibility for me than those of any religious writer. The same applies
to Barbara Bradley Hagerty’s Fingerprints of God. Both of them console and uplift me.
******** 2014

To William James and Barbara
Bradley Hagerty I add Eben Alexander. His Proof
of Heaven does a good job of answering materialists and I plan on writing
more about it.

2 comments:

Vincent M. Smiles
said...

The notion that most scientists reject belief in God because of science is not accurate. Elaine Howard Ecklund wrote a book on this (SCIENCE VS. RELIGION, 2010) in which she shows that scientists “self-select … from backgrounds where religion was practiced only weakly” (26), and, among the non-believing scientists interviewed, “it is not the engagement with science itself that leads them away from religion” (17).

If, as the Eastern Religions teach,God isthe Fullness of Being,How does that relate toCreation?

Many Eastern religions teachthe Non-Dualityof God and Creation,while Christianityseems to reside in God and Creationbeing separate.

An Eastern conceptis that God is to Creationas the soul is to the body,with God being the Soul,and all of creation,including us,the Body

Many in the Eastespouse Advaita,for which Creation and a personal Godare appearances,superimpositionson the reality of the Divine,also known asMonism.

In it,there is only one realitywithout differences and distinctionsin God,in pure Being.

In Monism,my separateness from all else in Creation,my separateness from the Creator,is an illusion.

True Self,Fullness of Being,dispels all separateness.In it,there is no otherness.

Those who do not accept Monism,while agreeing that there is only one reality,think of Creation asa relative existence,akin to the sun shiningin pools of water.There is only one Sun,one life, one truth, one reality,manifesting itselfin creation, in you, in me.

We are real,but in a completely relative reality.

The Hebrews saw humans as images of God.

Hinduism teaches thatGod is hidden in all things,all-pervading,the True Self within all beings.

Karl Rahner writes thathumans are constituted by a capacityfor Self-transcendence,that we are not fully human,until we transcend our human statewith the Spiritbeing that point at whichthe human spiritmeets the Spirit of God,in True Self.

Welcome

Interested in religions and spirituality? You've come to the right place.

In Shakespeare’s play, Hamlet says, “There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio,/ Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.” This is a two-edged challenge. It invites believers to rethink their dogmas, and it challenges people without faith to rethink their certainty that everything religious is bunk.